


break these bones ’til they’re better

by redskyatmorning



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angry Sam Winchester, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Episode Fix-it, Episode: s13e21 Beat the Devil, Episode: s13e22 Exodus, Gen, Hell Trauma, Hurt Sam Winchester, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Post-Episode: s12e02 Mamma Mia, Protective Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester-centric, Sam's Bodily Autonomy Issues, Trauma From Lucifer's Cage (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-19 05:16:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29621187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redskyatmorning/pseuds/redskyatmorning
Summary: After Sam’s torture at the hands of the British Men of Letters, the latest in a long string of violations, he is rescued by Dean and Mary – and forced to ponder his broken relationship with his own body. Months later, when Sam is resurrected and tormented by Lucifer yet again, Dean confronts Mary and Sam gets his revenge against the devil.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Lucifer & Sam Winchester, Rowena MacLeod & Sam Winchester
Comments: 27
Kudos: 84





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Essentially, this is kind of a loose collection of missing scenes or corrected/altered scenes from Seasons 12 and 13 that attempt to explore Sam’s traumas in a bit more depth than the show did. Also some more fleshed-out bro moments and other stuff. Basically, I hadn't watched SPN since 2015, binged the last five seasons over the holidays and tried to tie together some of my incredibly self-indulgent fix-its into something with a coherent theme. (Also this is not beta-ed so. sorry lol.)
> 
> Trigger warning - There is some somewhat descriptive stuff re: non-con (nothing lengthy, but reference to it in a bit of detail) so please do proceed with caution!!

Sam collapses to the ground a few feet from the driver’s side of the Impala. Before he can even think, before he even knows that his legs have moved, Dean is kneeling down on the gravel road, right there with him. Like a dark dance, a story with no happy ending, the pair of them always fall together.

They – Sam, Dean, Cas and Mary – are outside the farm in Missouri where Sam had been held captive and tortured for days by the British Men of Letters. There is a strange sort of non-urgency that hangs in the air around them: they were let go and the threat is gone, but it still feels like they are escaping and that time is of the essence.

“Sorry,” Sam says immediately, grimacing. His words are a bit slurred; he’s clearly out of it. “Left leg bullet wound, right foot burn. No shoes. Not a great situation for, you know, being ambulatory.”

“Shit.” Dean grabs Sam’s face in his hands, his heart still racing from the exhilaration of having found Sam alive. Sam flinches back before realizing that this touch will not harm him—it breaks Dean’s heart. It has been a few long days. Remembering that he is safe, Sam leans into Dean’s touch, exhausted. His T-shirt is all torn up, his face and shoulders and chest covered in blood—fresh enough to transfer onto to Dean’s hands and shirt.

“You’re okay now, Sammy, I’ve got you. It’s me. I’m gonna fix you up as soon as we get out of here, okay? You’re gonna be fine, and I’m gonna rip that bitch’s lungs out. I’ll break every—”

He has a detailed scenario planned out, but Sam doesn’t let him get very far, pulling him into a tight, fierce hug. It seems he has no intention of letting go, ever. For a few brief seconds, there is nothing else, no farm, no car, no resurrected mother, no God, no darkness and no universe other than him in Sam’s arms. Safest place on Earth. He thinks back to what he had been telling Mary about Sam these days that he had been missing. _He’s a good kid_ , he had said, struggling to explain. _Always has been. Smart, so smart, he was gonna go to law school. And – and kind. The best person you’ll ever know._ It wasn’t enough.

“You’re alive. I can’t – I thought you were – ”

Before he can finish the sentence, a sort of panic sets into Sam’s face as he looks at Dean, then at Mary and Cas over by the Impala, then Dean again, pushing him away in confusion. “Dean, is this real? This is real, right?”

Dean’s heart sinks—he never wanted to hear Sam say those words again, not since his soul had come back so damaged from Hell all those years ago, when his mind had broken. He wonders what has brought this on: exhaustion, the sheer weirdness of seeing his dead mom walking and talking, or was something more nefarious done to him in there? He presses his thumb into Sam’s palm so gently he can’t be sure that Sam even felt it. There is no scar there, hasn’t been for a few years now. It makes Dean feel better all the same.

“It’s real, Sammy, it’s me. Can’t get rid of me that easy.” 

“Okay,” Sam says immediately, and the sweetness of that little-brother faith will never not make Dean smile.

“I’ll explain it all, but right now we need to get. Cas, can you heal him?”

“No,” says Cas, suddenly hovering awkwardly above them. “I’m sorry. He turned off the warding to let me in, but there was something in them, it sapped my power. I’ll need some time before I have the strength. A few hours, maybe.”

Dean sighs. “Fantastic. Did you book a motel around here while you were scoping out the place? We can regroup there before we head back to the bunker.”

Meanwhile, Sam has found his footing again, pushing past Dean gently, and has begun limping in earnest towards the passenger door of their car where Mary waits for them, eyes wide with concern.

“Yes.” Cas peers at Dean, unblinking. “It’s about fifteen minutes east. I wasn’t going to because I don’t sleep, but I thought maybe you might need one.”

“Great, thanks, Cas. Sam, are you sure – ”

“I’m fine, Dean,” he calls over his shoulder. “Let’s just go.”

Dean turns to face his mother and brother, and catches them staring at each other, a kind of wonder and sadness writ large across both their faces. His head is pounding, ringing in his ears, the chaos of the situation not quite abated but not quite immediate, like they are in the eye of the storm. He can only imagine the disorientation that Sam is feeling.

“Sammy…” Mary trails off without another word, trying to take all of him in now that they are out of immediate danger.

Dean remembers the night she died as vividly as if it were yesterday, remembering how small baby Sam felt in his arms as he had run out of the burning house. How big and important he had felt to be entrusted completely with this tiny thing that he had known was so precious to his parents. (Not yet _quite_ as precious to him—he did not know enough—that would come later.) That was the only Sammy that Mary had ever known. And now he looks at Mary looking at Sam, all six feet and five inches of him, broad shoulders and arms thick as tree trunks, taller than John was, and he gets it – to an extent, he understands what she must be feeling. Sometimes he will look at Sam today and think of the scrawny seven-year-old, or eleven-year-old, or fifteen-year-old, that he was; and he will not understand where the intervening time has gone, he will not fully be able to reconcile his kind-hearted baby brother with the soldier’s body that holds his soul.

Sam smiles down at her, his brilliant, dimpled grin, and he can see his eyes getting wet as he tries to understand. “Mom, I – you – ”

“Everyone, get in the car,” Dean finds himself saying. “ _Now._ We can swap stories later, we don’t want those limey assholes changing their mind on us. We’ll make a stop at the motel so Sammy can get patched up, everyone can take a whiz, and then back to Kansas.”

***

“—So Chuck just left with Amara. No bomb, no nothing. And to thank me, I guess, she, um, she brought Mom back.”

Sam whistles through his teeth. “Wow. Didn’t see that one coming.”

“Right?”

“Well,” Sam says. Dean glances at him in the passenger seat: he is smiling at Dean like he has never seen him before. “Dean, I’m so glad you’re alive.”

To be loved by Sam is the warmest feeling Dean has ever known. He smiles in return, but he is facing the road again, so he doesn’t know if Sam is still looking at him. Dark grey clouds have begun to slowly gather above them—an innocuous storm with no deeper machinations, no dark intentions, no deadly fog. It’s a welcome respite. The sky always seems bigger on roads as wide-open as this one is, the Missouri farmland stretching out for miles around the two-lane road, punctuated every so often by small thickets of trees. Cas and Mary have taken Cas’s stolen truck and are tailing Sam and Dean in the Impala to the motel in Bolivar.

After a short silence, Dean says, “I really hate to ask, but did you tell her anything that we should know about? Just so we can deal with any compromised info ASAP.”

“’Course not, I was… oh, wait.” Sam suddenly sits bolt upright, eyes widening. “Oh God, I forgot—I mean, I don’t really—look, Dean, she used this spell on me, it’s all really foggy, but I might have – I don’t think I said much, but – I’m sorry.”

“Calm down.” Somewhat hypocritically, Dean’s voice comes out laden with concern so loud it might be panic. “What do you mean? The hell did she do?”

Sam doesn’t say anything. Dean catches his eye: shame contorts his face.

“I – it was a hallucination. It was magic. It was so real, she made me think we were – I didn’t know, it shouldn’t have made sense, but it did. It made it like we were, um. That we were, um – _intimate_ , and she was asking me questions in that context. I think I only said some stuff about hunters in America, nothing specific, but I did – once I knew it wasn’t real, I stopped. And then she started slicing me up to get me to talk again, so I really must not have said much. I’m sorry.”

It takes him a second to realize what Sam’s stuttering reply actually meant. Suddenly his _is this real_ freak-out from ten minutes ago makes more sense. Dean thought his anger had fully abated into concern once he was finally reunited with Sam, but the desire to snap that bitch’s neck with his bare hands washes over him again powerfully.

“God, that’s just sick,” he snaps. “ _Fuck_ that bitch. Sam, it’s not your fault. That’s – that’s witch bullshit, it’s not playing fair. Anyone would have broken. That’s—ugh.”

Sam leans back against the seat again, closing his eyes. Dean can see his chest heaving as if he were out of breath. Sweat is dripping from his brow—Dean has to look back at the road, hanging a left and then another left to get to the motel parking lot, but he could have sworn he saw a tear or two fall from Sam’s eyes intermingling with the sweat and the dried-dark blood from the lacerations on his cheek and forehead. Sam is quiet for a few long moments before speaking in an undertone so low Dean is half-convinced he didn’t say it at all.

“I really should have known. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done to me before.”

Dean wants to ask what he means, whether he’s referring broadly to having been the recipient of reality-bending spellwork, his hallucinations after the wall in his mind broke all those years ago, or something else entirely. He senses that he will not get an answer if he does. Sometimes, late at night in the bunker after a particularly hard day, to distract from his own memories of hellfire, Dean wonders what exactly the Devil did to his brother’s soul for one-hundred and eighty years in Hell that so mutilated it, but he knows that he can never ask, and that Sam will never tell.

The rundown place is almost deserted, the vacancy sign above the big block letters spelling out MOTEL illuminated faintly, helplessly flickering against the slowly encroaching darkness of night. Dean gets out of the car and swings around to the passenger side to help Sam.

“Alright, come on, Sasquatch,” he says gently as he pulls him out, the evening wind blowing coldly through him and mussing up Sam’s hair.

Sam is practically dead weight at this point, exhaustion and pain seeping into his whole body; Dean supports him with his own frame as they laboriously cross the parking lot together and into the motel room where Cas and Mary are waiting by the entrance. He sits Sam onto the bed nearest to the door, adorned by possibly the world’s ugliest comforter, brown-and-red checkered. Its cleanliness also looks a little suspect to Dean, but Sam does not have the energy to object. He seems to be fighting to keep his eyes open.

Dean pats him bracingly on the shoulder. “Sorry to make you do this, but I need to know if you need a real doctor before Cas gets his strength back, so tell me what the bitch did to you. Whatever you remember.”

Sam rubs his face, clearly trying to wake himself up. “Honestly, Dean, I’m okay, I just need a couple bandages…”

Dean fights against rolling his eyes. “Okay, then, give me the details so I can do it all to her when I get my hands on her again. Just whatever you remember, whatever’s relevant. Come on, Sam, we ain’t got all day.”

“Okay, okay. Um, the bullet wound’s probably okay, they had that doctor – well, that vet – look at it. Um, she burned my foot pretty badly. It hurts—it hurts kind of a lot. It got patched up too but it might be worth taking another look. Could be infected. Same with the wrists, from the cuffs, they’re kind of fucked up right now. Other than that she just sliced me up pretty bad, you can see that. Hurt like a bitch, but nothing too dramatic. Drenched me in cold water a lot, sleep deprivation – been there, remember? – some mind-fucking drugs – no, one was a drug, one was a spell like I, um, -- like I said in – said in the car.” Sam shifts uncomfortably, eyes downcast. “The other one was just – it tried to make me kill myself, I think? I don’t know exactly what the point of it was, but it sucked. But yeah, it was nothing I can’t handle.”

There is loud, loud silence for a moment. Dean’s heart feels like it has leapt into his trachea: he does not, can not, look his mother in the eyes as she watches them by the door. What a failure she must think he is: that he, as Sam’s last and only protector in the world, has made such a ruin out of him.

“Sammy, sometimes I think you can handle too much,” he murmurs, keeping his eyes fixed on Sam as he kneels down before the bed where Sam sits to re-bandage his foot, First-Aid kit laid out by his side. 

Sam lets out a laugh that is half a gasp of pain. He closes his eyes and flops his body back onto the bed, half lying down, leaving his legs to dangle past the foot of the bed where Dean is tending to his wounds.

“Yeah, well. Years in the Cage will do that to ya,” Sam says with the sort of twisted false bravado that Dean knows he learned from his big brother, that does not sit quite right on him. Louder, he calls over to the door, “Thanks for breaking that wall, by the way, Cas.”

Dean can hear the crestfallen expression in Cas’s pained voice, even as he focuses on bandaging up Sam’s foot. “Sam, I – ”

Sam doesn’t let him finish. “Just kidding,” he says quickly, not allowing the barb to sting for more than half a moment. Dean thinks uncharitably that maybe he should have. Sam mentioning the Cage always churns his stomach. “It’s water under the bridge. Forgiven, forgotten.”

“Okay,” Dean intervenes before Cas can respond (probably to ask which bridge Sam is referring to), playing mediator as a reflex developed in adolescence. “Sit _still_. This burn is fucking gnarly. I’m just cleaning it up so it doesn’t hurt you too much before Cas can fix you up.”

He winces and gasps as Dean applies a cold compress to his foot. Dean looks up to see his face contorted in pain—it’s been so many years of this for them, but it still twists his heart to see it. “Easy,” he murmurs. “Easy, I’m almost done. Then I’m just gonna bandage up any open cuts and your wrists for the road and we’re good to go. Don’t want you bleedin’ all over my baby.”

What he wants to say is _I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you from this. I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner. I’m sorry, I wish they hurt me instead_. 

“Wait, just hand me the kit,” Sam mumbles, though he doesn’t even move, much less attempt to push Dean away. “I can do these ones on my face – ”

“Shut up and just let me do it, okay? You can barely sit upright, you’ve got two broken ribs, you’re gonna mess it up if you do it.”

Sam smiles, his eyes still closed. Dean’s façades haven’t worked on Sam for a long time now, but it is easier, far easier, to not say what he means. And Sam understands each time, and they both take comfort in these little theatrics. His voice teasing, he says, “Thank you, Dean.”

Dean makes a face—out of habit. “Yeah, alright. I’ll give you some of the good stuff in the car so you can sleep on the way home.”

As he works on administering first aid to the burn, he hears Mary murmur something to Cas. He is still trying to mentally discern what she said when Cas replies in his poor attempt at an undertone, “Unusually so, I have been told.”

Then he realizes that Mary had leaned in and whispered, _so they’re pretty close, huh?_

He sees what it looks like, with him kneeling at Sam’s feet – how devotional a picture it paints, to an outsider. To someone who has not seen their life. He had tried to explain it to her, on the way over here: how they had, in the absence of anything else to hold on to, become each other’s entire worlds – but he guesses now that it must be something that needs to be seen to be understood. He knows that he is worth more to the world than just being somebody else’s brother, he knows that now; but this, he thinks – caring for Sam, the tenderness and the veneration with which he sits here cleaning away the dark red blood dripping sickly from his wounds – this gentle, willing sacrifice is the only thing that has ever made him special, made him holy, in the way that saints and myths are. The reverence he holds for Sam has always been to him a thing sublime, the only pure beauty in his short and ugly life; and, beatific in it, he is half-transported out of the dingy motel room with its peeling brown-orange wallpaper and into a kind of rapture that makes any observer’s judgement immaterial to him. Because the truth is, it does not just look like devotion: it is devotion.

* * *

“Sam?”

Sam jumps, startled out of a blank reverie. He had been poring over some Men of Letters lore books before he had become lost in – not exactly thought, but some vague and unpleasant sensation. It’s been a week or so since he had been brought back from being held captive in Missouri and he’s still feeling the effects, though Cas had healed his major wounds.

“Whoa, it’s just me.”

Dean leans against the doorframe of Sam’s bedroom, arms crossed, eyes averted.

It’s late—he had thought Dean had already gone to bed. It’s just the two of them in the bunker: it’s odd, getting used to Mary’s absence after not even having had time to get used to her presence. It feels like normal until he remembers that she’s out there, walking the Earth, not in her grave like she has been for his entire life. It’s strange and morbid and hard to think about.

“Yeah, sorry, yeah. Uh, what’s up?”

He shifts from one foot to the other. “I need your help,” he mutters.

Sam raises his eyebrows, nonplussed. “With…?”

Dean sighs. “Need to change a lightbulb in the library. You know how high some of the fixtures are in that room, and what with you being freakishly tall and all…”

As realization dawns, Sam grins, ear to ear. “Couldn’t reach it, huh?”

“Oh, shut up,” Dean snaps. “I’m gonna go find a ladder instead, you can go to hell.”

“It’s okay, Dean.” Sam gets up from his chair, making sure to stretch to his full height conspicuously. “A lot of short men lead very fulfilling and successful lives—”

“I’ll kick your ass if you say one more word.”

Still grinning, Sam follows Dean down the hall. In the library, the lightbulb in question is just a few inches out of range for Dean standing on a chair. Climbing up in his stead, Sam reaches it with ease—feeling a warm wave of fondness out of nowhere for these little domestic trappings of theirs. He is still wary about regarding the bunker as “home,” but it’s close. It’s something. And most importantly, it’s got Dean.

“So.” Dean observes from the floor with arms crossed as Sam finishes screwing in the bulb, very evidently trying to deflect from his temporary height insecurity. “What’s life like in your Gigantor body? Does it help with women or do they get intimidated?”

“Dunno. Wish I could just get out of it sometimes.”

The sentence, fully formed, slips out of Sam before he can even think about what Dean said, much less formulate a dry response to his light-hearted jab. He swallows, knowing that Dean will ask him to explain and knowing that he has no ability to. He climbs down from the chair, avoiding eye contact.

Predictably, Dean returns with “The hell does that mean?”

Sam shrugs, turning away at first, but he doesn’t drop it. For some reason, it comes spilling out today. He flings himself, ungainly, into the same chair he had been standing on and sighs. Dean, with some lore books and his laptop spread out on the table there already, joins him. 

“I don’t know, I just – I think back to, like, when I was at Stanford – ”

Dean stiffens ever so slightly, like he always does when Sam mentions his Stanford days. As if he is always worried that Sam is going to berate him for making him leave college, for not being able to save Jess, for everything that unfolded after that, as if he still thinks it’s all his fault, as if Sam’s destiny wasn’t darkened by Azazel’s blood six months after he was born. Sam has never known how to make Dean understand that he doesn’t have to carry that anymore, that he never did.

Sam sighs and continues. “I just think back to before all this started, and I think about the way – that I thought of myself, and I just felt more like me, you know. Like I was _all_ me. Like I was just Sam Winchester, a guy with a weird childhood but that’s it. Like this, my – my body, it was more mine than it is now. Before, you know, Lucifer left his fingerprints on my soul and all that. Before I found out about the demon blood. Sometimes I just don’t feel like – me. Like I belong to me. Not anymore. I know that doesn’t sound like it makes any sense, but it’s how it feels.”

Dean looks at him, brow furrowed. “Is this because of what happened with the Brits? The torture, that weird, uh— mind spell she did on you?”

Sam has to smile. “I mean, I guess that kind of brought all this to the fore again, but Dean. Come on. I haven’t been fully myself since I was six months old. Azazel feeding me his blood, and having his goons around me my whole life without me knowing – then – then Ruby – and – and Lucifer possessing me – torturing me – being soulless – getting possessed by Meg, by Gadreel, hell, by Crowley – and – and – and yeah. Yeah, this thing that just happened.”

Everything is coming out disjointed, insensible. There are just things he cannot explain to Dean, that he could never understand, even though he will try. After Gadreel, Sam had been kept up at night not only by nightmares, but by the fear of sleeping itself. A fear of losing time to unconsciousness, a fear of not returning from the pool of blackness once he succumbs. And if he doesn’t return? His hands are not his own: something else will be there behind his face, and it will do things in his name, and he will scream and scream and tear his body to pieces from the inside out to make it stop. He had feverishly searched for an anti-possession symbol that would work on angels, but to no avail. He’s still searching.

How does he explain to Dean that he can still go back to the place in his mind where he was trapped when Lucifer took hold of him, from where he was screaming and begging to be let out? That he looks at his hands and sees the weapons that killed Kevin Tran in this very place, that broke Bobby’s neck and beat Dean half to death that day in Stull Cemetery? That whenever he cuts into his own hand and pours blood into a stone bowl for a spell that needs human blood, he closes his eyes and wonders if today will be the day that it won’t work, the day the universe will realize that he has always been worse than human?

He can’t use the words with Dean, the words for what it actually feels like, because Dean will be disgusted with him and his weakness. That he was used, that he was violated, contaminated, polluted more intimately than Dean could understand by all of it – the demon blood, the possession, all of it – that he was raped. Defiled. His body desecrated, forever tarnished, forever something _other_ than Sam Winchester. Not just his body—his soul, incurably flayed and mutilated. His mind, broken into more times than he can count. All of him—unholy, utterly unholy. Oh, if he told Dean what Lucifer did to him in the Cage, Dean would never, ever look at him the same again. And he knows that Dean knows this, too – it’s why Dean never asked, it must be.

And then Toni Bevell broke into his mind and just – raped him again, like it was nothing, like it hardly mattered at all. When he had come to and she had taunted him – the words scorched in his mind: _was it good for you?_ – he had been consumed alive by bitter, burning shame. It was good. She made sure it was. He had no choice but to enjoy it, so he did. He wanted to break his own skull, claw his own brain out with his bare hands, so that she could never do it again, so that nobody could, but his hands were chained behind him. When she started cutting into his flesh with a blade, it had been a relief of a kind: he closed his eyes and focused on the sharp pain of his skin being ripped open, blood pouring out. This is something he can handle. His soul was skinned alive, after all, he knows pain—he can work with pain.

He thinks about her eyes, her lips, her body on top of his, pinning him down, forcing him inside of her—it felt so real, didn’t feel like force—he thinks about being pinned down in a bar he barely remembers, a vial of demon blood being forced into his mouth, his worst and most sickening poison—he was stronger, then. He spit it out, then. The Cage made him weak, but can he be blamed for that?—it was different in the Cage, a wholly different plane of existence made entirely of brimstone and torment, but he is held down still, by an inhuman weight, every inch of naked skin burnt by searing, ice-cold fire and screaming in agony and Lucifer’s hand—barely a hand, something like a hand, nothing human—gripping his face tightly, painfully, as he defiles Sam, again and again. Laughter echoes in his ears. He would laugh when Sam would scream and scream for him to stop until his throat was raw and bleeding.

He is so, so tired of it, being held down and trapped and violated, but it keeps happening, it keeps happening, it keeps happening. What’s it like being in this body, Dean asked so innocuously. But what a worthless thing it is—the muscle, the height, the soldier’s instincts, none of it can protect him because he has become rotted through to the inside, soft and pulpy and putrid, so it collapses in on itself.

But it’s clear how he feel doesn’t matter. It’s obvious: of course this is how they would try to get to him now. She had asked him about Ruby, so she must know his past. (He had said yes to Ruby, but she had used him worse than anybody and, God, he does not even remember who he was back then: whiskey-drunk and crying blood and wanting to take a knife to his own heart, cut it out and bury it in at a crossroads with yarrow and graveyard dirt, anything, anything to get Dean back.) This is how they will all use him, every chance that they get, because – they have to know, by now, they have to know that this is the way in which he is weak. They have to, otherwise why would it keep happening?

He thinks bitterly that she could have burned all his extremities clean off and it would have hurt him less.

“I just—I’m tired of that kind of thing,” he finishes lamely. He’s holding it together well, he thinks. He always does, at least when he’s awake. When he has nightmares he screams so loud that Dean can hear sometimes, and he never gives a good explanation.

Dean is quiet for a few moments, his expression inscrutable. “Well, the Gadreel thing’s on me, I – ”

“Dean, I'm not trying to assign blame,” Sam says with a chuckle he doesn’t really feel, and he's really not, because there's no point anymore, because every time he's tried in the past, he feels like the blame has always circled back and fallen straight on his own shoulders and the weight on them is already too heavy to bear so he just doesn't bother anymore, just swallows down anger like a bitter, bitter pill. “I just – you know what, this is a stupid conversation. I’m not making sense, I’m obviously just tired. Lightbulb’s fixed, you’re welcome, being tall is great, wish you could experience it. I’m going to bed.”

He can’t talk about it, won’t talk about it. If it’s inside only him, it’s not real. If Dean knows, it becomes real, becomes something _about_ him that somebody else can see, can touch.

“Sam, come on,” Dean says to Sam’s already hastily retreating back. “We can talk about it if you want to, I’m happy to, I’m just trying to understand – ”

“It’s okay,” Sam calls over his shoulder, his heart hurting with how much he loves his brother and yet how much he can never seem to say to him. “It’s nothing. Good night, Dean.”

As he walks back to his bedroom, Sam feels like he did something wrong, like this could have gone differently. It’s an unseasonably cold night, bitter wind whistling so loudly that Sam can hear it from his bedroom, but perfectly warm inside: the kind of night that would be perfect for something like this. A late night chat, maybe some cheap powdered hot cocoa for old time’s sake. For Sam, these days, there is no presence in the world more comforting than Dean, the conflicts of their past now dead and buried for the most part, as they move out of youth and into the slow slide towards middle age. Especially this soft, relaxed Dean, wearing one of Sam’s hoodies he fished out of the clean clothes pile—too big on him, but he says that’s why they’re comfortable. (“That’s mine,” Sam had pointed out rudely the first time. “And? You gonna fight me for it, bitch?” Sam had smiled.) The way his startlingly green eyes crinkle up with those familiar crow’s feet when he smiles, the top row of his teeth angled slightly inward, the scent of the same deodorant he’s been wearing since he was nineteen, the quiet version of his voice when he’s not trying to be funny or impress anyone—the familiarity of these little details, never changing, cocoons Sam like a warm blanket against a frosty evening. And the bunker, their strange little home, has slowly started to feel the same way too, reluctant as Sam has been to hasten the process.

This is the kind of night, the kind of relative stability and comfort, that he sometimes dreamed of having with a family as a teenager growing up in rundown, mildewy motel rooms. He just wishes he was still the person that had those dreams.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Fair warning, a scene in this chapter may come across as somewhat anti-Castiel)

There is nothing except the rusty, rotted scent of his own blood, dried all over his face, his neck, his clothes. He bled out, after all. Artery punctured and everything. He should be a corpse.

Sam walks through the underbrush of this forest in a foreign world, with the Devil two steps behind him.

He thinks about his own corpse, lying there in that dirty cave. A fitting final resting place. He thinks about Lucifer seeing his corpse, he thinks about Lucifer touching him. Brushing away his hair from his face to make sure it was really him, maybe. Touching his chest to bring him back to life. Caressing him in that way he used to do as a hallucination, on the back of the neck, the shoulder, anywhere, a twisted and perverse distortion of intimacy to remind Sam that he was still trapped, even if he got out. All while Sam lay there dead, unable to stop him, unable to know about it. He wants to throw up. He wants to die. He wants to burn off every cell in his body – every cell alive thanks to Lucifer – and become nothing. He wants to rip this thoroughly used, spent, battered thing called Sam Winchester to pieces with his bare hands and start again as somebody else. He remembers feeling like this the first time he met Lucifer, drunk on rage and anguish and wanting to tear his own body apart limb from limb, when Lucifer told him he was the vessel. _It had to be you_. And now here they are again. Never free.

He stumbles off the path and vomits at the foot of a nearby tree. Using the trunk to balance himself with one arm as he is bent double, he dry-heaves a few times, but there is not enough in his stomach for much more than a bit of bile to come out. _I can’t do this_ , he thinks, weary to the soul. Even he has a limit to what he can endure. So he stays there, as if he is locked in place, eyes closed. Maybe it will all go away if he just stops.

“Sammy, come on. Time’s a-ticking.”

The faux-concern in Lucifer’s voice fills him with something he can’t express. It’s not quite fury, not quite anguish, but some middle point between them. He has come up so he is only a few paces behind Sam, so close that Sam can hear his wretched breathing.

He clenches his fists—well, just the left one; his right arm balanced against the old oak tree is still the only thing holding him upright. He breathes, he doesn’t let himself get angry, and he thinks. There is an angel blade in his jacket’s inside pocket. The blade can’t kill Lucifer, but maybe, just maybe, it can incapacitate him, maybe for long enough that Sam can get ahead and warn the others. It’s a stupid, hare-brained plan, but he can’t not try something, even if he already knows he’ll regret it. He has to—for his family, for Dean, for Jack and Mary. He owes it to them to try at least.

He breathes deeply again and then counts to three in his head, and then tries to be as quick as he can though his brain feels like it has turned to sludge. In one swift movement, he pulls the blade out, turns around and stabs Lucifer in the heart.

Lucifer looks down at the blade embedded in his chest: he doesn’t seem perturbed in the slightest. He pulls it out, and it falls to the ground with a dull thud. With it, Sam feels his heart drop into his stomach.

“Oh Sammy,” he says, and Sam wants to kick him in the teeth every time he uses that nickname. “I didn’t know you were still that stupid.”

Suddenly, he can’t move, his legs trapped in place by an invisible force. Lucifer steps forward, towards him, and then steps forward again. He can’t move back, he can’t move away. His chest tightens—he can’t breathe—he can’t fucking breathe. He is shaking. He had been trying so hard to keep the Cage memories locked away where they normally are, but it’s all spilling out across his mind, like it’s a nightmare but he can’t wake up. God, he’s so fucking scared.

Lucifer is now inches away from him and, in a sudden movement, raises a hand. He doesn’t do anything with it, doesn’t hit Sam or hurt him with his powers—but Sam flinches back violently, raising his hands as a paltry form of self-protection, and the next thing he says out loud comes out in Enochian. _Please – stop – don’t – Please, God, stop._ These are the only words in the language of angels that roll off his tongue like instinct: the only pieces of heaven that could ever live in him are broken and twisted things that he wants to pry out of himself like bloody shards of glass. But he can’t.

“Good,” says Lucifer, smiling. “You remember. Don’t need to break you in again, that’s a relief. Didn’t take long the first time though, though, did it?”

His face is barely inches away from Sam’s face. He reaches that same hand up – Sam stiffens, flinches again – and brushes a stray lock of hair out of his face with cold, cold fingers. The touch chills him down to the bone. Sam now wants to burn his whole head of hair off.

Sam doesn’t say anything, trying not to look at him, trying to swallow down his shame, his heart thrashing against his ribcage so hard he thinks it might break out of it. He is trembling, all over.

Then: his ribcage torn out of his chest, heart and lungs and all with it, then forced back down his throat whole, wet and slimy, he chokes and it’s disgusting in the most visceral way possible, rubbery and metallic and he vomits and chokes on that and swallows that down too, and his jaw breaks apart and his face breaks open to so it can all be put back into place for it to happen again. Blinding, deafening, hysterical agony. The darkness, the aloneness, the emptiness, the only human soul in a dimension not meant for human souls. He never stops screaming. He blinks and he’s back in there. He blinks again and he’s back here, but Lucifer is here too, so how different is it? This is not happening.

He blinks once more and it stops. It was just a memory. They are in the forest, not the Cage. But _he_ is still here. Lucifer lightly runs a finger down Sam’s cheek—Sam tries to move his head away, but to no avail. He doesn’t know how much more of this he can take, before his heart explodes out of his chest, before he loses his mind again. There is only so much he can withstand.

He tries to hold it back, but a single tear escapes his eye and rolls down his cheek.

“You’re mine, Sammy,” Lucifer murmurs. “Every inch of your body, every breath you take, it belongs to me, because _I_ gave _you_ back your life.”

He grins, steps away from Sam, and twists his other hand: suddenly Sam’s insides are on fire. He groans in pain, bending double in a vain attempt to alleviate it. But he can’t move, he can’t stop it. All he can do is resign himself to it—and Lucifer is right. He does remember how to do that, all too well.

“But then, that’s always been true, hasn’t it?” he continues softly. “You were made for me, after all. Molded for me since before you were even born. Made to serve me, to hold me in your body. Well, it’s not _your_ body, never was, not really. _My_ vessel. You little abomination. Why did you ever think you could escape me for good?”

It hurts, so much—like a tongue of molten metal is coiled tightly around his intestines. If he doesn’t respond, maybe this will end sooner. In any case, Sam doesn’t have an answer. He’s not wrong—he’s not wrong. Ever since Lucifer has been free in the world, he knew it was only a matter of time before the dark, dirty things inside his blood make him subordinate to Lucifer’s control again, like it did last time, like it is his destiny to do, and he is so much weaker now than he was the last time. This is his life, this his body and this is his soul. Always has been. He can’t say no—well, he can, he can say it over and over again, a “no” alongside every single breath expelled from his lungs, but it won’t matter, because it never has, not with anyone.

He focuses on the pain being inflicted on him: maybe he was wrong when he told that awful woman in Mason City that pain doesn’t purge sin, now he hopes desperately that he was wrong, maybe this pain right now and all the torment of all these years will have scrubbed him raw and made him pure so that the Devil might leave him be in this lifetime. Gone will be the evil, his soul whole again. Gone will be the evil, his body his own again. Gone will be the evil. He closes his eyes—but doesn’t have a God to pray to, not anymore, so he closes his eyes and, not for the first time, he takes solace in agony, in the hopes that it will finally be enough to purify him.

He hears the smugness in Lucifer’s voice. Not looking at his face makes him marginally less nauseated, so he keeps his eyes closed. “Mm, there’s that dead, defeated look I know so well. This is _fun_ , Sam. I’ve really been roughing it on Earth this time around, you know. But you, Sammy, you know how to make a guy feel respected.”

“Shut up,” mutters Sam, and he winces when he hears how broken his voice came out. “Just fucking stop. We need to get to Jack, remember.”

“Good point,” Lucifer concedes, and his hands fall down to his sides. The pain leaves so suddenly that Sam lets out an cry of relief and nearly falls to his knees—he catches himself by one arm against the ground before he falls. He breathes heavily, not daring to look up at Lucifer for a few moments in case this was a fake-out, another thing he is used to, in case it starts again.

“No, no, you were right,” Lucifer says, answering Sam’s thoughts as if he can hear them—Sam hates that more than he can express in words. “That’s fine. We’ll have time to have our fun later, won’t we, Sammy?”

Sam shudders. Suddenly, he is so beyond tired, bone-deep exhaustion seeping into him with every movement. Nausea still floods his stomach, but hunger is hunger even if you don’t feel it, and it makes his head light and his bones heavy. But there is nothing else to be done. He sets his jaw and, not looking at the devil behind him, he starts walking on shaky legs to what he hopes is salvation, even though it never is.

* * *

Dean watches Sam’s retreating back, but doesn’t have it in him to ask him to stop, to come back.

“Where’s he going?” Mary asks Dean, as they both watch Sam leave, standing next to each other under the crude awning of a gutted, barely-standing wooden hut at the Dayton outpost.

He can’t look at her. Rain falls with a patter around them that, though quiet against the soft, damp earth below the trees, feels thunderously loud in the wake of what Mary has just told them.

She won’t come back home with them—after all this, she said she won’t come back with them. She refused her own rescue.

Dean finds it within himself to shrug, as if his feelings about this are casual. “Dunno. Kid usually needs space when he’s upset. I’ve learned not to chase after him. Immediately, anyway.”

Even though he always wants to. 

Last time Dean came to the apocalypse world, it was dry and frigid, as if the barren planet no longer knew summer or sunshine. This time, the atmosphere is oppressively damp, thick with moisture in light of the rainfall that hasn’t let up ever since they arrived in Dayton—it’s still cold, though. When the wind picks up, it chills to the bone. The base camp in Dayton isn’t exactly the nicest of digs, but at least they have the protection of both the canopy of trees overhead and the indoors in the form of the crude wooden cabins. The branches cast strange and unpleasant shadows as the evening starts to fall, creating the illusion of things lurking just outside of his periphery.

Dean knows part of that is because of what happened earlier today in the tunnels. His heart is still pounding out of his chest, his soul still feeling like it’s been rent in half, even though Sam came back. _He came back, he’s alive_ , he keeps saying to himself firmly, as if looking at Sam and touching him and hugging him is not proof enough.

The way Sam looked when he came back is still a haunting image imprinted into the inside of Dean’s eyelids, there each time he closes his eyes, the way guilt and shame made him haggard and hunchbacked, his entire frame drooping with the weight of it all. Covered in his own blood, so much of it that it makes Dean sick to look at.

He can’t stop thinking back to the conversation they had about Lucifer before opening the rift and crossing through to this world. Was that just this morning?—It seems like eons ago. It was the angriest that Dean had seen Sam outwardly get in many months.

* * *

They are in the bunker’s kitchen. Sam sits on the step by the door, tension animating his whole body ever since Cas had pointed out the unhappy truth of the need to involve Lucifer in the plan to rescue their mother and Jack.

His head is bowed, his shoulders hunched forward—he doesn’t look at Cas as he’s talking, doesn’t look at Dean, focuses on the floor. He’s hurting, Dean knows. He thinks about the years since Sam was sprung from the Cage, the hallucinations, the nightmares, the jumpiness that remains in his everyday manner ever since he came back. Sam swallowing all that down to face Lucifer again because he thought God wanted him to—but that was another trick, another torment. Sam doesn’t deserve this, he knows. What Sam deserves—the devil and every other entity infernal and divine on their knees before him, grovelling for his forgiveness.

And all Lucifer deserves is Dean killing him with his bare hands for making such a ruin out of his baby brother.

“I was used by Lucifer too. It was the worst possible violation, so I’m not taking your reluctance lightly, but he is already out there, and we’ve been ignoring it and avoiding dealing with him because we’re afraid. _We_ let Lucifer out of the Cage, and he has never stopped being _our_ responsibility.”

Sam’s tight shoulders had been loosening, his brow unfurrowing, as he was coming around to the idea – until Cas says these words. Then, Sam freezes.

Dean knows about Sam’s anger, all too well: it started as bitter resentment when they were kids, when Sam grew old enough to know what they were missing, what all the other kids had that they did not, and why. It boiled over into something resembling hatred for their father, for being the reason. Hot-blooded, his seething rage, for years, had seemed to always be present just barely under his skin, a stark contrast to his gangly frame and baby face that he took years to grow into. Impatience would creep into his demeanour nearly unprompted, sarcasm a biting instinct. An intrinsic part of him, inseparable from the rest. But that changed – the brashness of his anger, the youthful pride of it, it all disappeared after Hell. It still emerges sometimes, but it's a different beast now, wounded and tired. Now Sam goes stiff and cold – no longer burning hot. It's more thoughtful, quiet, a contained and precise implosion. He may still wield it against others, but not explosively, not without at least a moment’s pause. Almost as though he no longer thinks he has the right to his rage, not since what happened with raising Lucifer, not since the Cage, not since everything else that happened after that he must blame himself for. Still, the rage remains, even if he thinks he must keep it masterfully controlled.

So, Sam freezes. And closes his eyes. There is silence for a few moments, and Dean wants to nudge Cas, to make him take his words back, but it is too late. Cas seems to realize that there has been a shift in the conversation, that he has made an error.

“ _We_? _”_ Sam says, at last, with a quick, dimpled smile that has as much mirth in it as a hollow-point bullet to the head.

He stands up abruptly like a switchblade unfolding, towering over Cas. He had been making himself so small, sitting while they were standing, tucked into himself, so the suddenness of it feels almost threatening. While it doesn’t escape people’s notice that Sam is taller than most, he rarely uses it like this, to be deliberately imposing—at least, not since John died. (Dean remembers the smugness with which Sam would draw himself up to full height during their many arguments, once he grew taller than John and Dean both.)

Sam’s fist connects with Cas’s jaw. Caught by surprise, Cas’s head snaps to the side and he stumbles, but doesn’t fall. Equally caught by surprise, Dean stands up straight, ready to intervene but not sure how to—Sam isn’t going in for another blow. He’s just standing there, eyes averted, jaw clenched, hair disheveled. The angel, stunned, also does not react.

“We?” Sam says again after the silence between the three of them becomes smothering. “That’s strange, Cas, because last I checked, it was _you_ that let Lucifer out of the Cage. Single-handed. I know we were put in that situation because of me, because I got tricked by him, I get that and I’m sorry. I am. But you’re the only one who said yes to him—that wason you. I was trapped in that cage in Limbo with him for _hours_ with him trying to convince me to let him possess me, but I said no. Again and again, I said no. Because I _knew_ he would pull shit like this once Amara was dealt with and I figured it wouldn’t be worth it. So, no, Cas, it’s not _our_ responsibility. Because when it was me that let him out the first time around, you didn’t have a problem calling it _my_ fault and _only_ mine.”

“Sam, I – ”

Sam does not give Cas a chance. Dean cannot remember the last time he had seen Sam this violently upset before; he gesticulates wildly and erratically as he yells down at Cas.

“Cas, I _died_ for that. To put Lucifer in that cage. Remember? I let him inside my body and I died and I threw myself into Hell with him. In the Cage –” This is where Sam’s voice breaks suddenly – not a sob, but it’s almost like he flinches from the memory alone. He takes a deep breath and continues, quieter but no less enraged. “You have no idea what ‘violation’ even _means_. I suffered all of that just to lock him up for good, and then you just waltz in there without telling either of us what your genius plan was and expect me to shoulder the blame for him being free? When it haunts my fucking dreams at night, literally, that he’s out there in the world somewhere? Do you think that’s fair?”

“Sam – ”

“Oh, and, Cas, remind me,” Sam says, bitterness twisting his mouth into something that is not quite a smile, “what's the reason why I have to live with any of that in the first place? Dean put his ass on the line to get me my soul back and to get Death to protect me from those memories. But then some asshole angel decided to play God and needed to get us out of the way, and down came that wall. He knew it would destroy me, he just didn’t care. Remember that? Remind me who that was, again?”

Cas, who could not get a word in edge-wise, sounds frustrated. “What do you want me to say, Sam? That I’m sorry? I am, I have been. I'm sorry. I shouldn’t have said – ”

“Nothing,” Sam says. “I don’t want you to say anything. I’ve been understanding. I don’t want to hold it against you because there’s no point. And we’ve all made mistakes, believe me, I know that. But if you _ever_ talk to me about Lucifer again, I will cut your heart out with an angel blade.”

He sits back down on the steps, head in his hands, spent.

Dean can feel Cas’s eyes on him, imploring, as if to ask him what to do, a gaze that he studiously avoids. Dean had agreed with Cas that they may need Lucifer to get to the apocalypse world, but his heart aches for his brother, who does not deserve to be put through that yet again. And nothing he said to Cas was exactly incorrect. 

It is ultimately Sam that breaks the silence again. “Okay, whatever,” he says quietly, hands clasped together under his chin as if he is praying. His eyes are trained at some fixed point in the middle distance, not looking at either of them. “Let’s do this. But this is the last time. It has to be.”

Dean and Cas exchange a glance: Dean motions him to leave the room and hash out the plan with Gabriel and Rowena. Fortunately, he takes the cue and leaves without saying anything further to Sam.

“Of course, Sammy,” Dean says as Cas closes the door behind him. “We’ll deal with Lucifer somehow once we get Mom and Jack back. Promise.”

Sam looks at Dean for the first time since the conversation began. “Sorry about all that,” he says—and that hazy afterimage of Sam the young man, the more slender frame, the thick unkempt mop of hair, the simmering fury, evaporates from his demeanour.

What’s left behind is _his_ Sam, looking haunted. The Sam that has seen all of this bullshit through with him, the one that is far less flighty, the one that Dean knows will stick this through to the bitter end with him: someone so much more broken than Dean ever wanted him to be, but so much more _Dean’s_ than he ever could have hoped for. Strange and sad it is that those two things can only seem to go together—if Sam is whole, he doesn’t seem to need Dean in the same way. It twists him up inside when he thinks about it. Of course he never wanted any of this to happen to Sam, never in a thousand years, but is it wrong of him to consider this a silver lining?

“Nah, don’t worry.” Dean smiles at him, that practiced big-brother smile, bracing and gentle. “Honestly, he had it comin’. Probably shouldn’t have _hit_ him, but – you’re right. This has to be last time. This is the last thing I wanna put you through, I know it’s not easy—”

“Thanks, Dean,” Sam cuts him off, returning the smile quickly and without feeling. Clearly he doesn’t want to talk about it. He never does.

He did this the last time too, that night when Dean asked him to change the lightbulb in the library. He had mentioned being possessed and tortured by Lucifer for the first time in a long time, but then cut the conversation off abruptly. _You have no idea what violation even means_ , he had said just now, with enough barely-hidden anguish to make a shiver run through Dean. Dean has been to Hell, has been a demon, might know a thing or two about violation himself. But if Sam won’t talk, Dean won’t make him. He can’t—that much he knows about the kid.

* * *

It’s this scene that was playing and replaying in Dean’s mind when Sam told him how he had returned from the dead. _It was Lucifer_ , he said hollowly, eyes deliberately and fixedly averted. _He brought me back._

Dean hadn’t known how to respond, and had just matter-of-factly given him the last of the protein bars he had packed for the journey. He had just said “ _Eat_ ,” and Sam had tried. He had nibbled on a corner, but even that looked like it was difficult to stomach. He did not try another bite, but kept holding it in his hands as if he were just about to. But Dean had nothing else to say to Sam, tortured and torn as he was by the circumstances: if he hadn’t left Sam to die in the tunnels at Cas’s insistence, he would never have been there for Lucifer’s latest torment. But if he had brought Sam’s body with them, he would have had no way of bringing Sam back to life in this deserted world where he has no standing with cosmic forces. It’s a physical ache, this situation where nothing he could have done could have helped his little brother.

Suddenly, urgently, standing here in silence with Mary, he needs to look at Sam, to touch him, to feel his presence. To make sure that he is there, all there, that no piece of him got left behind in the veil of death. Each stupidly long hair on his head, the mole next to his nose, his deep dimples when he smiles, those uneven rings of yellow-brown encircling his pupils in the middle of his green eyes, that make them shift hues in sunlight kaleidoscopically. Is all of that still there? Did anything get lost when the Devil brought him back from the dead? The thought, as quickly as it came, threatens to consume him. 

But after Mary said her piece just now, moments ago, Sam had looked at her and looked at her and then walked off without saying a word, leaving Dean with their mother, and Dean doesn’t know where he went. He can’t blame Sam either. He himself is shaking with barely-restrained rage. Sam wasn't angry, his eyes dull and lifeless, filled with a defeated kind of sadness.

They came all this way and she doesn’t want to go back with them. She won’t even entertain it.

Dean remembers how Sam had smiled at him this morning when they arrived here, buoyant with the thought of bringing her back from here and the hope of building a relationship with her. Dean remembers how Sam screamed, _screamed_ his name as he died bloody in the tunnels. Dean remembers how Sam shuddered at the mere thought of bringing Lucifer back into their lives again, and Cas had thrown that in his face, and now—

The thought of losing Sam for good, of not going back home with him, never turning to the passenger seat and seeing him there again, of never seeing his stupid snarky grin again—he’s back, but Dean can’t shake the bone-deep ache of his grief for those few hours when he did not know. And now it transforms into anger: the way everyone around him, people that he loves and that are supposed to love Sam, is treating Sam fills him with a fury so violent he almost wants to check his forearm reflexively, feeling as though the Mark will surely be there.

“Mom,” he says to her, voice shaking with the effort to control himself.

The harsh evening wind of this barren world blows around them – it feels like it goes right through him, even as the chill worms its way into his chest. The shadows are getting longer around the pair of them, mother and son, night falling fast.

“Dean,” she says, almost imploringly, green eyes wide and concerned. The wind blows her unkempt hair into her face.

Her eyes are startlingly like his own. She and Sam, by contrast, have little resemblance. Sam looks a little more like John, but his eyes are his own.

“Why don’t you love Sam?”

This isn’t what she is expecting. It’s not the right thing to say, either, because Dean knows that she does love him. But he can’t help but think that she does not love him in the way that he deserves, and this is one thing that Dean cannot give Sam from his own heart. He steps forward, she steps back, looking almost scared.

“He never had a mom,” he snarls. “You know that. I had standards for you, I’ve been thinking about those memories I had with you as a kid for my entire life. That’s why you tried with me, at least a little. But Sam? God, Mom, it’s like you didn’t even _want_ to talk to him. He would just take whatever scraps you’d give him, you thought. Well, you thought wrong. You hurt him so bad with all the crap you pulled with us before Jack was born. You should’ve seen him, he was so fucking desperate to get you back so that maybe if he saved you that you would finally want something to do with him.”

Dean blames himself, too, not that that’s a surprise at this point. He had been so wrapped up in his own issues with Mary that he had not spared much thought to the way that Sam had felt disregarded by her, no matter how much he tried to placate Dean and understand her point of view. It had all hurt Dean so much that he could barely breathe, let alone work out the strangeness of Mary’s distance from Sam—growing up, the thought of his mother had always made it hard to breathe, hard not to fall to his knees and cry. He thought it would be different now that she was around, but it wasn’t, not always.

But even as children, he would never be able to talk about her with Sam. If she was mentioned, Dean would get angry, or John would get angry, half-crazed with grief. Sam never had much more than pictures of her. Only years later did Dean realize how lonely it must have been to live in a family so utterly shattered by the loss of somebody that you were barely allowed to remember. Dean still recalls with a flinch the way his father yelled and yelled when he had tried to make Mary’s casserole with Sam, that rainy night so crisp and clear in his memory—it was when they were renting that rundown little house in Bismarck for a couple of months. Sam had happily gone out in the humid summer thunderstorm to get whatever ingredients they could, grinning ear-to-ear (but trying to hide it, in that pre-teen way) that Dean was going to share this with him. Now Dean won’t ever forget his face when John came home and shouted at them and threw the mess they made all in the trash, distraught and crying himself. Dean had told John, it’s okay, we’re sorry, while Sam stormed off. This is all Sam got when trying to find something of his mother to hold on to: punishment.

Then Amara brought her back, and Sam must have thought that he would get the blanks filled in, finally. A place to direct all that love brimming out of him, that he never knew where to put, because his brother and his father could never bear to show him. And this is what he got. Ripped to pieces and killed trying to save her so that maybe she would look at him, and she still doesn’t fucking _care_.

 _Tell Sam I love you boys_ , she had texted him once last year. He didn’t tell Sam; he still doesn’t know why. A part of him wanted her all to himself, just like he had for all these years because Sam did not grieve her like he did, not really. Not as a person—more as a concept. He had given so much to Sam when they were kids, readily and happily, he would do it all again, but maybe some deep-seated part of him just wanted just this one thing to himself. Maybe he liked being the favourite, maybe he took a perverse joy in Sam being comparatively iced out. Neither of them had felt like John’s favourite, so this was new. This was nice. For Dean. _He just doesn’t have as much in common with her_ , he would think. Guilt agitates his stomach now, but it’s not his fault, is it? She should have tried harder with Sam. What could Dean have done?

After Sam’s outburst at the shapeshifter’s counselling office, he wanted to tell him about the text, about other things, but by then it seemed far too little and far, far too late.

Sam, as a baby, cried so much in the weeks after she died, needing his mother. John didn’t know how to stop it: the wailing echoed around the hotel room they lived in after the fire, into the long hours of the night. The first night he didn’t, Dean’s little heart had felt heavy, thinking, _he doesn’t remember her anymore_. He remembers the Mother’s Day card, the first and last, that four-year-old Sam had made in kindergarten just because all the other kids were making them—addressed to nobody, given to nobody. It had made Dean cry. He knows Sam keeps it somewhere still. How could Mary think that her boys had space for any more sadness, any more loss, in their lives?

Mary’s eyes have become wet with unshed tears. “Dean, did he tell you all this? Is that what he thinks? It’s not true, none of it.”

His words are hurting her, but he doesn’t care. In fact, he wants to twist the knife. He thinks about Sam’s eruption in the kitchen this morning, his wild-eyed anger at Cas, the desperation with which he had said _I died for that_. Sam had never sought thanks or recognition for his sacrifice in Stull Cemetery: Dean knew he always believed that it was his own personal wrong to set right, and none of them had ever really tried to disabuse him of that notion. But in that moment he saw the pain that came with nobody seeming to care about or contemplate how much he had lost that day. The wholeness of his soul, the last dregs of his innocence, his life. His _life_. He was barely twenty-seven. And again, today, he had his life ripped away from him. And again, it was thrown back in his face, almost immediately. By his mother. It makes Dean see red.

“He didn’t need to tell me,” he says, looking her square in the eye. “He died for this, Mom. I saw him. I saw the blood, I saw his body being dragged off. He’s back and I still can’t stop seeing it every time I close my eyes.”

The fangs, making contact with Sam’s neck. Sam’s wrist, immobilized, unable to decapitate the vampire. Sam yelling _Dean_ as his carotid artery is punctured, his faith in his brother unwavering to his last breath. But Dean couldn’t save him. His stomach churns still.

Sam’s forced smile, when Dean says _Mom says she’s okay, she was on a werewolf hunt but she might swing by here tomorrow_ , and Sam says, _she told you that?_ and Dean says, _yeah, just now_ , and Sam glances at his phone, his face falling just a fraction when there is no text notification there.

Why does Dean feel guilty? It’s her fault. It’s her fault, and he’ll tell her.

Dean continues, his voice stretched taut. “He died trying to save you. And trust me, the way he was brought back? I’m sure he’d rather be dead. But you wouldn’t know that. You didn’t even try to get to know him _._ And now you’re gonna throw everything away, again, because of these strangers. Strangers. Your _son_ , your baby, he died to get you back. Mom, he _died_. His throat got ripped out and he died. I get that he’s back, but does that not mean anything to you?”

“It did – Dean, this is unfair – ” She has averted her face, trying not to let him see that she’s crying, but he can hear it clear as day in her voice. “They’re strangers to you, but they’re not strangers to me. They matter, too. We save people, that’s our job. Sam gets that, I know he does.”

“Of course _Sam_ gets that,” Dean snaps. “Sam would rip his own fucking heart out if it meant helping someone even if they did nothing but hurt him, but that doesn’t mean...”

He trails off, not knowing what he’s going to say next. That they shouldn’t try to save people? She is right, of course. He’s not being fair, not entirely, at least.

“Dean.”

The voice comes from behind him, a voice he would recognize in the deepest pits of hell. Dean whirls around; Sam’s eyes are slightly reddened, but other than that he looks a bit better than he did before. He has washed the blood off of his face and neck, changed into fresh clothes. He walks up to them and tries to smile, but it doesn’t quite come out right. He doesn’t try again. 

“It’s okay, Dean,” he says, but he’s not looking at their mother, he’s looking at Dean. She’s not looking at him, either. “She didn’t ask me to die. I don’t get to decide how she feels about it.”

Dean doesn’t know what to say to this—it seems oddly pointed. He looks at Sam to see if he can discern his meaning, but he just looks tired.

“More importantly, I have an idea,” is what he says, and for the first time since he came back from the dead, there is that glimmer of hope in his eyes again.

***

“Hey.”

Sam is sitting on the back porch steps of one of the little moss-encrusted abandoned huts, all the way at the distant edge of the clearing that makes up the encampment, so that it looks out onto denser forest. Three steps between the wet dirt and the wooden deck: Sam sits on the middle one, his long legs still bent almost double as he rests his arms on his knees, looking out into the trees: his back is to Dean, so he can’t see what is written across Sam’s face. His shoulders are tense.

“Hey,” Sam says as Dean approaches, but he doesn’t so much as look at him. After a few seconds of expectant silence on the part of Dean, he continues.

“You shouldn’t have blown up at her like that, not over me,” he says with a grimace. “She’s just – she’s doing her best. And she’s not wrong. It did sting, but she’s not wrong, not at all. We know that.”

Dean sighs. “I know. I know, I just—watching you die, that shit fucks me up, you know. I get mad, I get – I lose my mind.”

Sam chuckles weakly, still looking out into the distance and not at Dean. “Yeah—yeah, I know. Glad I got back before you started bartering your soul again.”

“Ah, shut up.” Dean comes closer and sits down next to him, mimicking him by staring out into the wooded underbrush. It’s easier to talk like this—they’ve gotten so used to having these conversations on the road where there is a built-in excuse not to look at one another. Much easier. “So, stupid question, but how’re you holding up?”

There is silence for a moment, save for the rustling of wind and a slow drip-drip-drip of rainwater from somewhere. The rain itself, fortunately, has stopped.

“I should be dead,” Sam says finally, so casually he could have been saying _I’m fine_ or _I need something to eat_.

“What?” Those are not words he wants to hear from Sam, now or ever, and he protests, aggressively, as a matter of instinct. “No. Sam, _no_. That was a freak accident, it wasn’t – destiny, or whatever. I mean, come on, we’re not even in our own world. Doesn’t count. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be – alive. Here. With me.”

“No, Dean, that’s not what I meant,” Sam says, and sighs. “I should have died when I was twenty-four. In Cold Oak, that day you sold your soul, remember? Sometimes I just think that all this, all this – bullshit, this suffering, this endless fucking gauntlet of supernatural crap that’s been thrown at me since then, it’s a punishment for keeping me around past the sell-by date, you know? Now I’m alive because—because of—of—” He stammers, not being able to say the name, and then sighs and continues in a different direction. “I just can’t seem to stay in the dirt anytime anything tries to correct the course and puts me down.”

Dean considers this, his heart sinking. What he says is, lightly, “You mean like _Final Destination_?”

This gets a laugh to bubble out of Sam, a quick flash of dimples on his face, but he keeps his gaze averted, staring out in the trees before them. His smile has started to remind Dean of their father, in a way that twists him up inside. “Uh, yeah, kinda. But I guess it’s not that, not really, not if you think about it. I was tainted a long, long time before then. Just didn’t know it. I was just never meant to be okay, I guess.”

“Sammy, come on,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady even though his brother is breaking his fucking heart. “None of that is your fault. You’re not tainted, you’re just—we’re just unlucky. Look at this fucking world, man, look at it. It’s a fucking wasteland. You know what this world didn’t have that ours did? You, Sam, you. Nothing else.”

 _Look at me_ , _too_ , he wants to say. _You exist for me to love. Let that be enough._

Sam finally looks at him when he says this, so that Dean sees the wetness in his eyes for the first time. The tears don’t spill over, though, and he blinks them away. “And you,” he says with a small smile. “Don’t forget that part.”

Dean returns his smile. “Sure, yeah, me too. Don’t let—God, I know it’s hard, but don’t let that evil bastard under your skin, man.”

“He’s already been under my skin,” he says. “That’s kinda the problem, right? He already knows everything inside my head.”

Sam rubs his face, tired. It’s an interesting little quirk, the way he does that when he’s trying to contain his feelings, as if trying to wipe them away from his visage by force. Dean has garnered the reputation of being the closed-off one between the two, but the distance Sam can usually put between his heart and the face he wears for the world, with practiced ease, is almost frightening. He can seem nearly unknowable, though Dean is at least somewhat aware of the fathoms of abyssal depth behind that pensive expression. But today the cracks are showing, easily.

“I just—I just—I don’t want him anywhere near me, Dean.” He looks down again, playing nervously with his hands. “I can’t—I can’t lose it right now, but I’m slipping, I can feel it, whenever he’s around.”

The hallucinations Sam had when he came from Hell, the complete breakdown of his psyche, are a vivid memory in Dean’s mind—the way that Sam’s eyes had been seeing without seeing, staring into nothingness from his hospital bed in that psych ward so many years ago. Sam’s fists are clenched now, knuckles white, and Dean doesn’t even want to imagine what’s going on in his mind.

Dean sighs. “I don’t like any of this either. For your sake more’n mine, but—look, I’m here, okay? And listen to me, Sam. As – ” he swallows. The way Sam looks up at him just then when he said _listen to me_ , with his little-brother earnestness, it makes him want to break something with his bare hands. “As long as I’m around, nothing bad is gonna happen to you.”

They were so much younger when Dean last said that to Sam. It was a lie then and it is a lie now—maybe not a lie, maybe just a prayer, a psalm. Having faith in a god that has done nothing but let you down and drag you through hell, because you are devoted to it, because it is your salvation, because it is the only thing you’ve ever had to hold onto. Because you love it.

Sam takes a long look at him, then smiles ever so slightly. “I know.”

* * *

_He’s my father_. That’s what Jack had said after Sam told him that he doesn’t know who Lucifer really is. He’s not wrong, Sam thinks, but it’s not sitting right with him. Nothing is, at the moment. He had tried so hard with Jack, not only because he loved him—and he does, so much more than he thought he would—but he tried so hard to make sure he didn’t end up like his father. He tried so hard to be the kind of father that Sam himself never had, so that Jack might never want for anything from his own blood, even if he hoped and prayed that he would never meet his real father.

But, of course, blood is blood. Sam glances at Dean walking several paces ahead of them; Sam knows better than anybody how deep the bonds of blood run. They always pull people together eventually.

They’re walking down a forested path towards base camp, not unlike the path he had to walk with Lucifer in tow earlier today. Eerily similar, in fact. The sky is overcast, silver sunlight filtering weakly through a thick layer of smoggy cloud. This world is colder than their own, Sam has noticed, and even protected by a sweatshirt and jacket and his own tendency to overheat, he feels the chill start to seep into his skin.

Ahead are Dean and Mary, behind are the rest. Next to him are Lucifer and Jack. He’s trying to keep an ear out as to what Lucifer is saying, but his head is ringing, his senses tuning in and out at will. It’s been a long few days. With how bone-deep his tiredness is, he barely knows how he’s upright, let alone walking briskly towards a big master plan to rescue just about everyone they can.

“Jack,” the Devil is saying, “You have to understand the context. My father, God, your grandfather, cast me down, but—he made everything. He made _me_ , you, he made me the way that I am. God _wanted_ the Devil—”

Sam closes his eyes. He can hear that sentence, _God wanted the Devil_ , clear as a bell, in his own voice. His own lips forming the words, his own vocal chords making the vibrations, but he is trapped and drowning on the inside of his brain, he is kicking and screaming to be let out of the prison that is Lucifer’s vessel, that is his own body. Eight years ago, but he still can’t forget, he won’t ever be able to forget.

He tries to tune back in—these sound like dangerous waters. “—I’m not the bad guy here, if you think about it, I’m an innocent. A victim, even—”

“Right, that’s it,” Sam snaps and throws a long arm out to stop Jack from taking another step. Lucifer stops with them, studying the two of them with beady eyes but saying nothing.

He maneuvers Jack over to the side of the path, letting the hunters walking behind them move past them. Lucifer follows them with a sort of curiosity. Dean looks back in concern but Sam gives him a nod. This shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, and they will be able to catch up with ease. Dean looks reluctant but keeps moving.

“That’s fucking enough,” he says, to Lucifer, mainly, but the tightly coiled anger feels like it could be directed at anyone in the vicinity.

Quickly, Sam pulls out a bottle of pills from his backpack, his every movement deft and precise and furious.

“Jack.” He holds out the bottle to Jack. “You remember these?”

“Yes,” Jack says confidently with a small smile, clearly proud of himself for knowing the right answer. “That’s your sleeping medicine. You usually keep that in your room. If you don’t take it, you don’t sleep well.”

“Right, good,” he says, powerless to not return Jack’s smile, if only briefly, despite the god-fucking-awfulness of this situation. “If I don’t take them, I sometimes have nightmares. But I never told you why.”

Jack nods, serious. “You didn’t. I asked and you said you would tell me another time. Is this when you’re going to tell me?”

“I’m gonna show you,” he says grimly. “Can you look into my mind?”

“No,” Jack says resolutely, brow furrowed, “you told me I shouldn’t look into people’s minds unless I have their permission.”

Sam has to smile again. God, this kid brings out a light in him he thought had died permanently a long time ago. “Jack,” he says gently, “I just gave you permission.”

Jack grins sheepishly. “Oh. Right. Okay, I’m doing it.”

Sam opens the box mind that he tries to never touch, that only spills out when he is asleep and cannot exert control. He focuses on all his memories of Lucifer’s greatest hits so that when Jack touches his forehead, eyes glowing yellow-gold, he will see exactly that.

The dry-land drowning that was possession, choking on his own screaming silent voice, trapped in his own mind. The long, black fall into the pit. And then, and then. Flesh scorched and flayed to the raw nerve, body and soul burnt to ashes over and over again, immobilized and viciously beaten, skull crushed, dismembered and cut open and vivisected and meat hooks in his eyeballs and a pain like his organs are being rotted and tied into a knot and his body turned inside out, and raped and raped again, and he feels every moment of it because he can’t die, can’t even pass out or sleep. And then all over again. Sixty-six thousand days, not one hour of respite.

Jack’s fingers are at Sam’s temples for about ten seconds in total, but it feels far longer. When he breaks the connection, Sam is unsteady on his feet for a moment, his mind overrun—it takes a few moments to gather himself after the self-imposed onslaught. He can’t bring himself to look at Jack, who is quiet. Nobody has ever known or seen so much of him and his disfigured soul.

Except, that’s not necessarily true, is it, he thinks bitterly.

 _Remember, I spent time in that walking corpse of yours. I know your sad little thoughts and feelings_ , Meg had said. She had said that six years after she had possessed him, the first time. She still remembered.

 _Your insides reek of shame and weakness_ , Gadreel had said after he, too, had been inside his head. On the money.

Then, last year, Toni Bevell. _Was it good for you_?

And of course, the worst one of them all. _I’m inside your grapefruit, Sam. You can't lie to me. I see it all_.

Like he often has before, Sam has the powerful urge to calmly take his brain out of his skull and field-strip it like a handgun, take it apart lobe by lobe and meticulously scrub it clean with an oiled rag before putting it back in.

The air feels even colder, suddenly. The sky seems wider and greyer than it did before, but at the same time the trees around them loom larger and darker, closing him in. The wind, picking up, cuts against Sam’s skin like broken glass, tousling his hair. He is looking at the ground, dry grey-ish dirt and gravelly rocks, twisting his hands together with a sort of anxiety.

After a few moments, Jack’s voice, pained. “Sam…”

“That’s who Lucifer really is,” he manages to say, though he feels hazy and out of breath, his own voice sounding like it is underwater. “Just so you know.”

“Hey, no, Jack,” comes Lucifer’s whining voice. “Whatever he showed you, you can’t know that it’s the truth. Sammy makes stuff up all the time. He’s just doing that to turn you against me.”

Sam closes his eyes again, willing him to fucking die or disappear already. Anger swells up in him, but like it so often does these days, it withers and dies as quickly as it came: he is not the same person that he used to be, the person who would burn hot with barely held-back rage for days on end. Maybe it is for the better, but it is hard not to mourn the loss of youth, the loss of the person he might have been today if it hadn’t been for what has transpired in his life. What was done to him to wring out all that anger—he would rather have the anger back.

“Shut up,” he says through gritted teeth, eyes still closed. “Jack, you know you would be able to tell if I was showing you things that weren’t real. Trust yourself, if you don’t trust me.”

“Sam, I trust you. I trust _you_.”

He sounds upset. Sam looks over at Jack now, and his eyes, widened and blue again, no trace of gold, are wet with tears. He realizes now with a sinking feeling that this, alone, was an act of cruelty: this kind of thing, this much Hell, it’s not easy to process, even second-hand. Especially not for a child. But he couldn't let Jack get close to Lucifer, to get inevitably hurt by him, he had to nip this in the bud—he can't let more people get hurt because he didn't stop it.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms, as if that will make all this go away. “Jack, you didn’t deserve that—but I just needed you to know. I needed to, I’m sorry. The rest is up to you.”

Jack looks at him askance. “Don’t apologize to me, Sam. He should apologize to you, he should—” Changing tack, he suddenly turns to Lucifer with that particular sort of childish imperiousness that toddlers have when they wish to exert their will on the lesser beings of the world. “You should apologize to Sam.”

Sam can hear his heart thudding in his ears. He has to smile slightly, but it’s not funny, not at all. For Jack, an apology can fix this—he wonders where that sweetness came from.

“No,” says Lucifer, looking Sam directly in the eyes. Sam holds his gaze, much as it makes him want to vomit again. “He ruined my plans. He deserved it.”

Sam nods, to himself, expecting nothing less. Maybe he did deserve it, he made so many mistakes and maybe pain does purge sin, but he is so tired of pain and he still doesn’t feel clean. So he is angry again, powerfully angry. It fills up inside him like storm-plagued waters, barely within his grasp of control. He wants to fall to his knees, to scream, to tap into that deep eldritch part of his self that he dare not venture into, that he hasn’t for over ten years, and fling the devil across the world using his mind alone. But he has a plan. The anger cools into resolve. He will stick to the plan, and Lucifer will be dead before tomorrow dawns.

* * *

Before they had gone through the portal, Sam had taken Rowena aside. “It’s ready, right? It’s all fixed up?”

“ _Yes_ , Samuel,” she says, eyes glittering. “The work you did was _quite_ good, for a hunter. I perfected the spell-craft of course, but yes. It will work, don’t you worry.”

“Okay. So you keep him trapped. If he escapes and follows us somehow, I’ll make sure he follows us back out. When we’re back, we'll get it from where we’ve hidden it and we’ll get him this time, I swear we will, Rowena.”

She smiles ever so slightly at him, and Sam detects the barest hint of tenderness. “I know we will.”

* * *

Rowena, surprisingly enough, became the easiest person to talk to. Sam always finds it easier to talk about this kind of thing when there’s work to be done, when there’s a reason to not look the other person in the eyes, when there’s a readily available change of subject.

They had cleared a space in the bunker’s library to work on fixing the Lance of Michael, the only weapon they had that would have a shot at killing Lucifer. The key to its power was in the rune work, so Sam had the idea that if they could replicate the original runes, then it would regain its power. Dean had found the prospect questionable, but Sam had figured that getting Rowena in on it, after he’d spent sleepless nights for a few months tinkering with it himself, would help their chances of re-forging the weapon. Once she knew why they were doing it, she was fully committed.

A few days into the project, they are both sitting around perusing lore books with the broken weapon sitting on the table between them. 

“Are you sure this will work on Lucifer?” she says out of the blue, after maybe an hour of silence punctuated only by the flipping of pages and Sam sipping his coffee. “The lore isn’t exactly clear.”

Sam grimaces. “Not a hundred percent, but I know what Michael and Lucifer are like with each other. Intimately. If Michael made this weapon, he made it so it could kill his brother, trust me.”

She nods, takes a sip of tea, and continues perusing the grimoire before her for a few moments with forced casualness, before her curiosity gets the better of her. “So what do you mean, intimately?”

Sam looks at her, and then looks down again. Sometimes he mentions parts of his life that he would rather forget, not remembering that these are not normal things and that people will want to know more. “Intimately as in trapped in a cage in hell with both of them for the better part of two centuries. Not a lot of love lost between them, I’ll tell you that much.”

For the first time in the years that he’s known her, Rowena seems genuinely taken aback, her manicured eyebrows rising and her mouth forming a small ‘o’ of surprise. “And that’s – that’s where you saw it? His true face?”

She sort of blurts it out—her poise doesn’t waver, it never does, but it’s clear she didn’t mean to ask it quite so bluntly.

Sam suddenly wants this to stop and for her to go away, wants to walk out of the room and into his bedroom and close the door and not speak, but it is an entirely selfish impulse: she seems hesitant, like him, like she wants to talk it out but doesn’t know how. Maybe this could be good for both of them.

“Yeah,” he says finally, trying to smile about it, trying to be light-hearted. “Couldn’t see it when he possessed me, but in Hell, yeah. He’d take different forms, but that was one of them. When I came back I hallucinated it too, sometimes. That was a whole thing too, before we met, old news at this point, really.” 

He takes a glance at her, before looking back at the page of the book he’s on, full of words that he can’t even see as he tries to keep himself controlled, keep the memories at bay. He doesn’t care for the look on her face, the surprise still there but now intermingling with pity.

“I knew about the possession and the Apocalypse and all, but – ” Of course she did, Sam thinks, it seems to have become a campfire story, after all, the worst fucking thing to ever happen to him. She struggles to find the words. “And he—he tortured you in Hell, Lucifer?”

“Um,” Sam smiles, awkwardly. He starts playing with his hands nervously again, pressing that place in his palm from all those years ago—the pain is long gone, and the scar a faint white line, but it’s still oddly soothing for him to this day. “I don’t—um, I don’t like to talk about it. He did awful things to both of us, I mean, that’s why we’re here, right? Let’s get back to work?”

She affects being affronted—it’s almost genuine, but there is a hint of performance to it—her glittery eyes narrowing at him. “Samuel, that’s not fair. I told you and your lout of a brother my story in gory detail, it’s only fair that I hear yours.”

He remembers telling her about the feeling of helplessness never going away, remembers that a load had been lifted off of him when those words were spoken out loud, remembers feeling lighter. So, for once, he talks.

“Lucifer ruined me,” he says, looking down, not wanting to see her reaction. “In every sense of the word, in every imaginable way. I was violated and possessed and tortured and broken and – ” He swallows. “—and raped, and I still can’t sleep at night because of it. I was made for him to use, the whole reason I was even born, was to be his vessel, just a, a _thing_ for him to use. And he keeps coming back and coming back and coming back and I can’t express to you in words how much I hate him and want him dead.”

Again, there is silence. She must be disgusted with him, she thinks, at his weakness. He keeps his eyes fixed on the book before him, his face burning with embarrassment—she must be looking at him, big and burly and awkward, and wondering how he could have let all of that happen to him. Again, Sam presses the absent scar on his palm, the feeling of pressure and heat a balm to his mind, even if there is no blood or pain anymore.

“And then you took his son in to raise like your own child,” she says wonderingly after a full minute, and that’s not even anywhere near what Sam is expecting her to say.

“I—what? Of course,” Sam says, surprised to almost a comical extent, turning to her so abruptly he almost cricks his neck. She is regarding him curiously. “I mean, it’s not Jack’s fault where he comes from, what he's made of. I know that better than anyone.”

She smiles at him, this time completely genuine. “You’re a good man, Samuel.”

 _I’m not_ , he wants to bite back immediately, out of habit. He wonders if she knows that he’ll think about her saying that, unprompted, for a long time. Whether she meant it, and whether it’s true. Still, it fills him with warmth for at least a moment, and that’s not nothing.

* * *

Dean watches as Sam stumbles through the portal with Lucifer in tow, about forty-five seconds after he came through with Mary and Jack and the rest, into the bunker’s library. This gave him just enough time to tell Rowena to go lift the protective magic that she had placed on Michael’s lance, that it was go-time. She rushes back into the library in a swish of silk fabric, holding the lance for dear life, just as Sam comes through. Dean, waiting near the doorway, grabs it from her wordlessly.

“Sammy, think fast,” Dean calls over to him, and tosses the ancient angelic weapon to him, several feet across the room, as if it were a beer. Sam catches it deftly, one-handed, as intended.

Dean’s heart is pounding out of his chest, his palms so sweaty he’s glad he isn’t the one holding the weapon anymore, sure as he is that it would slip right out of his hands. Adrenaline is rushing through him like rip currents from the events of the day, hell, the events of the past three minutes—they barely made it out alive. And if this next part doesn’t work, they may as well be dead men walking. He swallows hard, every muscle tense with anxiety. He can’t even imagine what Sam must be feeling.

Lucifer looks haggard and gaunt, visibly injured in the fight with Michael that killed Gabriel. His mouth is stained crimson with blood from a split lip. He wonders idly, in a stretched-out moment between heartbeats, how that works, how much the injury of a human vessel's flesh hurts a thing that is only possessing it.

Then time keeps marching on swiftly, and Sam whirls around to face Lucifer as the portal fizzles out. Lucifer glances at what he’s holding and recognizes it immediately.

“Come on, Sammy,” Lucifer says. “Are you trying to kill me? Is that the big plan here?”

But he takes a step back anyway, and then another one, putting distance between him and Sam.

Sam doesn’t say anything, his chest heaving, swallowing hard. Dean is worried—is he going to freeze? He doesn’t want to not trust Sam to get this done, but there is always some part of him, that domineering older brother instinct, that wants to do everything for Sam, to slap his hand away and do it himself to make sure it’s done right. It’s uncharitable to his incredibly competent little brother, so he swallows it down most days, but sometimes he finds it bubbles up.

“Sammy, come on,” Dean says, a hint of warning in his voice, trying to say _you better do this fast before he slips through our fingers again_.

Sam turns his head and glances at him, so briefly that Dean can barely catch his expression—it didn’t look like fear, though. It looked like he was—relishing this. Savouring the moment.

“Yeah, _Sammy_ ,” Lucifer taunts, “Come on. I mean, do you think this is gonna work? Do you think you’re gonna be rid of me that easy?”

He’s stalling, Dean realizes. His power had been depleted when he was injured in the apocalypse world, and he can’t seem to fly away or do anything else to stop them. But the way he’s not trying anything, the way he’s just killing time—it’ll be a matter of only moments before he gets his mojo back, before it’ll be too late again. _Sammy, come on_ , he thinks again.

“I mean, _me_?” he continues. “Last time you tried to get rid of me you had to throw your own soul into hell for me to fuck around with for eternity. You think it’s gonna be that easy this time, you think there isn’t going to be a price, Sammy?”

Don’t listen, Sam, Dean thinks urgently, worried that he's going to buy into the manipulation.

Sam hesitates for a fraction of a second more, but then, with resolve, he stabs the Devil in the heart. There is a black expression of pure hatred on his face.

“It’s _Sam_ ,” he says, and violently twists the blade.

Lucifer falls to his knees. Rowena runs over to Sam, clutching at his elbow.

“Is it done?” she demands.

“It’s supposed to be slow-acting, so not yet,” Dean calls over, still a few feet away from the action.

Though a slow death is satisfying, it is nerve-wracking.

Lucifer is on his knees before Sam, cracks beginning to appear in his vessel’s face, a sheen of sweat coming over him. The magic of the lance must be seeping his power to self-heal or do anything else to prevent his fate, like it did with Cas when they first encountered it, Dean figures. His heart is thumping against his chest, waiting, wondering if this is truly the end. He wants to go over to Sam, to—to protect him, somehow, in case it isn’t, but something keeps him frozen in place, breathless, adrenaline still coursing through him. 

Suddenly, he groans in pain. “Sam,” he says.

Sam raises his eyebrows. “What?” 

“Sam – Sam – This isn’t the way it was supposed to happen – ”

“I know,” he says, voice carefully made calm—Dean can hear the things held back, but he knows that no-one else can. “You know me. Not a big fan of the way things are supposed to happen with you and me.”

Lucifer makes that awful guttural noise of pain again, like the cry of a wounded animal. The rotting cracks in the skin have begun to spread down his neck, across most of his face, rendering it nearly unrecognizable.

“This isn’t – come on, sever the runes, don’t – forgive me, Sam. Can you forgive me?”

These words hang in the air for a moment, against the tense silence. Dean is thinking: Sam’s deep kindness and capacity to forgive—the pathetic, awful death wrought by the lance’s magic—is he going to—

“Not even a little bit, but keep begging,” Sam says finally, tilting his head and narrowing his eyes. There is not a shred of empathy in his demeanour; the sight is almost chilling. “How do you think this is gonna end?”

Those are the last words that Lucifer speaks, as slimy black ichor begins to choke out of his mouth. This is when they had cured Cas, so Dean isn’t prepared for what comes next. The cracks in the vessel’s flesh begin to widen as the skin begins to rot in real time, and the same black goo begins to bubble out of those, out of the eyes and ears and nose. Lucifer slumps down and falls to the ground unceremoniously. His groans of pain have turned into whimpers.

The smell is putrid, worse than rotting eggs and shit and sulfur combined.

Rowena, disgusted, moves several paces back, no longer next to Sam. “Is that supposed to happen?” she says, wrinkling her nose.

“Yeah, that’s the magic working,” says Dean, still looking at Sam, whose eyes are fixed unblinking on the sight of Lucifer decaying alive—and he’s got the best seat in the house as he towers right above his almost-corpse, his stomach surely turning from the smell—as if he is held there by force. But he isn’t, and that’s just the thing.

After a few minutes—some rotting flesh falls clean off the vessel’s body and onto the floor with sick, wet _thwap_ —the whimpering stops and Lucifer stills completely. Dean stops breathing as the world comes to a standstill.

It’s over.

It’s almost anticlimactic, but it’s what he deserves. He doesn’t deserve his prize-fight, he doesn’t deserve something epic. He deserves this sick, ugly, nasty, small death in a no-name little corner of Kansas.

Dean turns to Rowena, who has clasped her hands together and smiles brighter than he’s ever seen. “It’s done,” he says, and he can’t help grinning back.

Her eyes glitter as she can’t quell her smile. “About time.”

Dean is all business, trying to focus, though his hands are shaking. Though he just wants to take Sam in his arms and hug him tight and say _you did it, you’re free._ But there will be time for that later. “Okay, we gotta take this corpse and burn it with holy fire, then take the ashes and stick ‘em in one of those Enochian puzzle boxes and take _that_ and bury it somewhere deep. Or launch it into the sun or—something. No fucking chances. And I’m callin’ it already, Sammy, I ain’t cleaning this up.”

But just then, Sam falls to his knees, the lance clattering to the floor next to him. He breathes heavily for a few moments, his eyes wide with surprise, and then just when Dean thinks he’ll look at Dean and break out into a grin – _we did it_ – he crumbles, his face scrunching up as tears start trickling down his cheeks. His head bows, hair falling into his eyes, and he sobs—quietly, at first, trying to hold them back, his lips quivering with the effort, but he is utterly unable—his hands clench into fists as he is overcome. Dean hasn’t ever seen him like this. The sound of it, the soft whimpering, is enough to cut Dean’s heart into pieces. Sam never likes to cry around other people—not even Dean—but right now he doesn’t seem to care about Rowena, or the fact that Cas and Mary and Jack and some of the other hunters have started to filter into the library from the war room where they had been shunted off to after coming through the portal. But Sam does not even seem to register that anybody else is there at all.

Dean recalls his distant memories of Sam wanting nothing more than to be a person with a house and a lawn and friends and after-school clubs, the way that he would defiantly pretend at normalcy in the liminal spaces that made up their entire childhood: and under dim motel room lamplight and gas station fluorescence, Dean would look at his brother and wonder why he was so desperate to leave.

He remembers, suddenly and out of nowhere, something from thirteen years ago when he had just picked up Sam from Stanford a few weeks prior. They were in a shitty motel room in nowhere fucking Wyoming, and Sam was telling Dean that he had started a community garden in Palo Alto with Jess and some college friends. He’d laughed at him, called him a geek or a girl or something. A community fucking garden. God, to think of the things that Sam had wanted out of life when he was a younger man. Against the things that he got.

But even then, back in the long, hot motel-room days of summer when they were kids, he supposes, Sam felt impure, unclean, and maybe that’s what he wanted to run from, as if he ever could. Sam didn’t know, then, when he went off to college and met the girl he loved and took the LSAT and booked that interview he never made it to, that the form of his life had been shaped by bloodied hands and yellow eyes for a dark fate, eons before his birth, his child-body being watched by demons and archangels like vultures circling overhead, just like Dean’s, unbeknownst to either of them. They could never have been free, not in any version of this story. That girl died like their mother like Sam saw in his dark dreams and he lost his life and then everything he had to give and then more than that. Sam, his baby brother, born under a bad sign, cursed, body and soul. Sure, Sam was stronger than the Devil, he wrestled him and he won—twice now—but God, Dean thinks about everything that Sam lost, everything he could never have, because of this dead creature lying before them. This unspeakable evil that bled into Sam’s mouth and forced its way into puppeteering Sam’s body and tormented Sam’s mind and soul to ruination in hell and on earth, but that could never find its way into the deep-rooted goodness of his heart—as if all that isn’t enough to break a person, but still Sam never broke. And now it’s over—it’s over, but all the damage is done. There’s no getting any of it back. Not the people nor the years nor the innocence lost. There is only grief.

Sam’s crying is harsher now, he doesn’t care to hold it back, or perhaps he just can’t; his shoulders are trembling violently, and he can barely breathe, each halting breath a short and shaky gasp for air between rasping sobs.

Dean goes over to him now, does not say a word – what can you even say? – but wraps his arms around his little brother’s shuddering body, smoothing his hair back and kneeling down next to him on the floor. He kisses the top of his head gently, a soothing gesture he hasn't done since Sam was maybe three years old, but the instinct is coiled tightly, ready to spring forth, in his muscle memory as the easiest way to say _you're safe, you will be okay, this will pass._ Sam clutches at him blindly, leaning on him. Like a dark dance, a story with no happy ending, the pair of them always fall together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know, because sam should've killed lucifer and this was the first dumb thing that popped into my head in terms of ways he could have plausibly done it within existing canon. i tried to write sam in character while trying to reconcile the fact that he was written kinda poorly in later seasons while also sometimes using him as a conduit for my own bitter sam girl behaviour (but he needs to stand up for himself more!) so... i tried


End file.
